


Here and Now: an epilogue to "Where and When"

by kla1991



Category: Warehouse 13
Genre: F/F, acommonrose, bering and wells gift exchange 2014
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-25
Updated: 2014-12-25
Packaged: 2018-03-03 10:43:04
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,234
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2848049
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kla1991/pseuds/kla1991
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“Did you know,” Myka begins, and when Helena looks up from her plate, Myka is gripping her fork like a weapon and staring at her, sharp-edged but hopeful, like the stray dog in London that Christina had tried to befriend. “Did you know before it happened that you were going to kill someone?”</p>
            </blockquote>





	Here and Now: an epilogue to "Where and When"

**Author's Note:**

> Written for acommonrose during the 2014 Bering and Wells gift exchange.
> 
> trigger warning: suicidal ideation

            There was really no reason to bother Myka, sitting on the back porch as the sun went down. She’d taken a jacket, and her Colorado blood would likely withstand anything. Besides which, every time Helena mentioned something about the chilly air, Claudia just called her ‘grandma’ before continuing to muse about fixing the time machine for the purpose of ‘mani-pedis’ with Cleopatra, which Helena knew nothing about.

            What she did know, though Claudia refused to heed her, was that there would be no more time machine. Not after yesterday, when Pete and Artie had lifted the body of Rebecca St. James out of the very chair Helena herself had sat in, and let the Regents’ collectors carry her off to her rest. That much Helena knew.

            Knew, also, that it had been her chair; there were deep gashes in the armrests where her fingers had clawed them.

 

 

            “I couldn’t change it, HG,” Pete had whispered, sometime during all the disruption of daily life moving forward, the clamor of hunger demanding more attention than despair, the weakness of sleep overwhelming the strength of their grips on what was rapidly fading into ‘this morning,’ edging ever toward ‘yesterday.’

            “I’m sorry I let you think you could,” Helena had answered.

            Pete shook his head, insisting, “Don’t apologize for that. Don’t ever apologize for letting people think things can change. I mean, it’s the only way stuff ever does, right?”

            And he had raised his hand, almost clapped her on the shoulder, before casting an odd glace at Myka and shuffling away.

            Helena felt her grip tighten, like it had on the arms of the time machine chair. Because he had been her only hope, that boy—her last wild shot at making the past whole, and the future bearable. But it wasn’t, and there was nothing to be saved.

 

 

            Now, though, Helena shakes the thought away. Over the hundred-year-old screams in her head, she calls out from the back door, “Cherry tart?”

            Myka doesn’t move. Helena steps up to the table, to get a look at Myka’s face from a safe distance. She’s staring out across the fields, where a spring wind from the badlands ripples through the grass. It’s going to rain soon, brutal, and long into the night.

            “I made it myself,” Helena hazards.

            That draws Myka’s eyes to the two plates in Helena’s hands.

            “I helped Leena make it.”

            Myka purses her lips and looks up at her at last. Helena drops the plates onto the table and flops into the nearest chair, grumbling, “She let me pour the filling.”

            The huff and headshake she gets in response are the same as she’d gotten when the microwave ignited, and there is a ghost of that affectionate smile.

            “It’s warm,” Helena advises, and Myka turns to the plate closest to her, watches the steam rise and the ice cream melt in the yellow porch light, before turning her eyes back to the yard.

            Helena tries another tactic: “Have you heard from Pete?”

            “Have you heard from Artie?” Myka asks in reply, and it’s a relief to hear her speak, but something is amiss yet. “Pete said he’d call Artie when he got the knife. But he’s probably not there yet. It’s late, and there’s no point tripping around that orchard in the dark.”

            “I doubt you’d have a problem.”

            “Yeah, well,” Myka mumbles.

            She picks up her fork and stirs the melted ice cream on her plate. Helena begins to eat, hoping to encourage her. The cherries bite into her senses, and she nearly gags. Many things these days are too sharp, too obtrusive, after the cottony nothingness of bronze. Oh, how she’d wished then for cherries this sweet, a night this cold, anything at all that she could feel, even as she craved just a bit more nothingness, something a bit more like sleep. Now, she knows better. Fresh air alone had given her blinding headaches for a month and more. All she wants now is for all of this to—

            “Did you know,” Myka begins, and when Helena looks up from her plate, Myka is gripping her fork like a weapon and staring at her, sharp-edged but hopeful, like the stray dog in London that Christina had tried to befriend. “Did you know before it happened that you were going to kill someone?”

            Helena’s stomach is wrenched into knots. She thinks she might be sick, as she was so often in her first days after the Bronze. After James.

            “No,” she gasps. “I don’t think I knew as it was happening.”

            “I knew,” Myka says, and she takes a bite of tart.

            At first, it seems like she’s finished, and Helena doesn’t know what Myka’s talking about, what Myka could possibly have done. But then she licks her fork, slowly, and speaks again.

            “My sister had this boyfriend. I mean, as much as a twelve-year-old ever has a boyfriend. When she decided she didn’t want a boyfriend anymore, he grabbed her, and shouted and shook her, and I found the bruises on her arms. And I found that boy, and I beat him into the ground, and I told him if he ever touched my sister again, I would _kill_ him. I meant that. I was fourteen, and I knew, right then, that eventually I would kill someone.”

            It’s a strange, detached way of thinking, Helena’s body frozen and breakable while her mind charges on. Through Pete and Myka’s account of what had happened, though Pete’s mourning and the strange distance between him and Myka. Not grief, Helena thought. Anger. And how wise of them not to speak of it, not to let the words burrow into them and have to hear what each of them thought. But Helena has to know, and so she says what she knows: the name of Myka’s victim.

            “Beth Raite.”

            Myka nods.

            “It’s not like I had much choice, I mean, she was on me with that knife, and it was the only weapon between us, right? But after, I just… I stood up and let it happen. I knew she was going to die, and I didn’t even try to save her.”

            “She murdered three women, and would have happily killed you and Pete and…” Helena trails off, because Myka is looking at her strangely. “What was there to save?”

            Myka says, “She was a person. There’s always something to save.”

            Oh god, if only Myka would save her. Helena is leaning, reaching, but Myka turns away again.

            “But I knew I couldn’t. I mean, you can’t change the past, and there’s a reason for that. I could have tried, but what would the point have been? And would I have done it, if I knew it’d make a difference? One person, over the entire timeline, and however many people it would cost? She could have killed Jonah, or Pete and me, which would pop all four of us out of existence, and all the people we _did_ save, and I’m not gonna risk that. Thank god I couldn’t. Because if I’d really had a choice…”

            The lingering taste of cherries in Helena’s mouth dissolves. Rain has started. It thumps into the hollows between the grasses on the lawn, and out across the empty desert, and Helena wants to fling the table out into the mud, because dear god, Myka didn’t even _try_.

            “I’m sorry,” Myka says, and the look Helena turns on her is likely searing. But Myka is talking to her empty dessert plate. “It’s obvious why you built that time machine, and I’ve been trying to guess all day which must be worse for you: Pete thinking he can change things, me thinking we can’t, or you knowing from experience which one of us is right.”

            Helena lets out a long, slow breath through her nose, impressed it doesn’t steam between the cold of the evening and the heat of her fury. She breathes in again, and it cools her.

            Myka continues, “And I’m sitting here thinking how miserable I am and throwing in your face every little thing that you can’t do anything about. I haven’t even asked if you’re okay. You’re not. I know that. I’m sorry.”

            Since they’d met, Myka had dragged things out of Helena that she had not planned to admit. Like those ice machines in all the hotels she’d stayed in: Myka would press a button with her hard-edged questions, and Helena would shake, and rumble, and reply.

            _“What did you steal from the Escher Vault?”_

_“Why were you bronzed?”_

            Myka demands. Helena doesn’t know there is another button on this machine of theirs until Myka whispers, almost pleads, “How did it happen, when you didn’t know it was going to?”

            And Helena sighs, and shivers, and begins, “James said he knew ‘the plan,’ that he would tell you everything, but there was nothing to tell. Cracked out of a bronze shell like a bloody egg, how much of a plan do you think I had? All I’d told him was that the Warehouse had things which belonged to me, and that before I did anything for him, I expected to have those things back. He’d told me plenty, of course, about himself and the world I found myself in. The darkness, the emptiness—that it was all for nothing.”

            She sobs, and the sound shocks her. Myka nods, as if she’s heard this before. Perhaps she has; it was like a mantra to James, and it may well have been his final words. Oh, the agony that man had been in.

            “Not that it mattered,” Helena continues, and it encompasses everything: her longing for James, who might have understood her; the rain that the ground drinks, and it will be thirsty again in a moment; the way Myka is looking at her, as if she does understand, and the rage Helena feels in her throat at that gentle gaze. “Nothing James said or did would have saved him. The end result was the same, for him at least, whether or not anyone caught up to me. He would be bronzed. And the thought of it, even for him, for whom I had no particularly warm feelings…”

            Helena wonders if it’s painted on her face now, the way she longs for death. The thought that there can be no further agony, even in that country from who’s borne, no traveler returns. It’s unlikely there’s anything after death, anyway. To die, to sleep…

            “I suppose it felt like mercy. It certainly didn’t feel wrong.”

            Myka believes that everyone is worth saving. That there is something in the most wretched of men that can be saved. Anticipation coils in Helena’s stomach, churning with the unfamiliar sugars of her tart, and she waits for Myka to lash out at her, and she can strike back, and whatever this foolish pull between them is will be shattered for good.

            The rain picks up in a rush, spatters the table between them and stings against Helena’s skin. It is the only blow that comes.

            “Sometimes there’s no good choices, huh?” Myka asks.

            And there is no hard edge left in her. Her eyes are wet, and her smile is loving, and Helena doesn’t understand what she has done to deserve this.

            But they are understanding each other. It’s exhilarating, this idea that Myka might understand: there is no other choice, no other future Helena can bear but the one that’s hurtling toward them now.

            “I’m sorry,” Myka says again.

            Helena shakes her head and murmurs, “I came out here in the cold to find out what was wrong with you, and I don’t regret your telling me. You don’t need to be alone, darling.”

            “You neither,” Myka says, and her knuckles are white around her fork. “Not anymore.”

            They both seem to sense it then, that something has changed; Myka cannot fathom the depth of it, but Helena trembles from knowing. Eyes locked with Myka’s, her rage and despair drip from her and puddle at her feet.   
            Of course, they can’t just sit here in the elements, staring and holding their breath. Helena’s tart has gone to ruins in a lake of melted ice cream, and what little juice Myka has left behind is hardening on her plate. The night is inching toward tomorrow, and the tomorrow after that, and no matter how long they stare, this moment will slip away. Helena’s fingers twitch and relax on the table. Myka clears her throat.

            “I’m gonna take these plates to the kitchen,” she says.

            China scrapes together, and she crosses behind Helena to the door. But she doesn’t open it.

            “I know it’s selfish,” Myka starts. “And I swear, if I had a chance, I’d try to change what happened. I just…”

            “Myka.”

            Helena reaches over her shoulder without looking. The warmth of Myka’s hand in hers is a surprise, a revelation. She cradles their joined hands to her shoulder, rests her chin on Myka’s knuckles, and sighs.

            The past is a rock that weights and drowns the future. There is nothing left to save. And yet.

            The future is on rails now, unstoppable. There is nothing better to hope for. And yet.

            This gentle present is unlike anything Helena could have imagined, and if she will allow it, something might yet be saved.

            She begins by saying, “I’m glad I’m here, too.”

 


End file.
